Kill the Ancient Wyrm. It's got good gold, a bunch of items, and it seems like its items are beefed up a little, beyond the drops of any other monsters. Kill 3 of them and I feel like you can practically guarantee a bow of power or vanq.

Scavenger Agent in Razor is spectacular. Don't waste your time setting it to pick up random reagents in the forest. Mine was just set to look for gold. If you're at an IDOC and expect trophies or treasure maps to fall, you can add those to it. The gold is very helpful when killing things like blood elementals. Or stealing gold from those those that are. You can stealth around and scavenge gold from them as someone else does all the work trying to kill them.

Reactive Armor is way underused. It is cast as fast as mini-heal, costs only 4 mana, is un-interruptable, and I think it negates more damage than Mini-Heal (mini-heal will heal 11-15 damage or so, whereas Reactive Armor seems to block somewhere between 15 and 20 damage). Not only does it block the damage, but it also deals a bit of it back to your enemy. Plus, you won't get disrupted from a hit that's blocked by it (or poisoned!). And since disruption is based on damage... even if a hit goes through your reactive armor (let's say it's a hit for 18 damage and 15 is absorbed by the spell and 3 is done to you), it seems to me that the number of damage you actually take (3 in this case) is what's applied to the disrupt chance formula. So in terms of helping you get a spell off, like a life-saving Recall, this can be nearly as vaulable as Magic Reflect.

Meteor Swarm and Chain Lightning will bypass Magic Reflect. So if you've got an enemy low on life and they've thrown on a reflect item, the only recourse most people know is to just spam Harm or Magic Arrow until they take it off or it wears out. But by the time that happens, they'll be healed up and safe. So your alternative is to cast Meteor Swarm or Chain Lightning. If they're the only one in the area (make sure you're 2+ tiles away), either will do the same damage as a Flamestrike.

Choose macing. Whether you're a tank or a dexer, PvP or PvM, it may be the best weapon skill choice. For PvM, if you've got some good magic armor on (and/or high parry and a good shield), macing will drain stamina from whatever you're beating on... slowing down it's swings back at you. Not a huge difference-maker, but it might be the difference between being able to go toe-to-toe with a Balron, and having to run off every few swings to heal. Additionally, you can use magic wands and staves without a penalty to getting hit. I was fighting a player the other day and had him low on life, and as he ran he equipped a gnarled staff of greater healing. The benefit of this is you can use it to cast the spell while you run. But, I was right on his tail, so as he was casting each charge and healing 40 HPs or so, I was hitting him 100% of the time with my war fork because I had 100 fencing and he had 0 macing. The net effect was about neutral in terms of damage, but I did get to poison him with one of my hits. Lastly, there is an era-accurate bug that allows some potions to be used while holding some 2-handed mace weapons. I forget which, but test it out. It's a major pain to disarm and expose yourself with 0 wrestling (and possibly lose a swing by punching) to chug potions.

Hiding in the Lich Lord room. Most people know about the era-accurate line-of-sight bug in the Lich Lord room on that platform. In short, one's Line of Sight is broken by every tile on there. So typically, if I was say 2 tiles away from you, I could target an Energy Bolt at you. On this platform, I cannot. Additionally, if you are a GM hider, you must be at least 8 tiles from an aggressor to be able to hide. In the Lich Lord room, that's now 1 tile. It's hard as heck to kill someone on that shelf; if you're a GM hider who understands how it works up there, it's nearly impossible to die.

The table-dropping macro is amazing (Matron de Winter posted this a while back). Of course, better than a table is actually a keg or a footstool. For some reason, you can move diagonally around a table. But, if you try to move diagonally around a keg or a footstool, you rubberband (you also rubberband if you try to run straight into it). You can get someone hung up on that for a few seconds if they're not expecting it. (Try it: plop down a table, and face it. Now move your cursor so the gauntlet points diagonally to one side. Now right click and hold to move. If you do this next to a table, you'll go sideways and around. If you do it next to a keg or footstool, you rubberband).

No one uses their teleport/invisibility/magic reflect items nearly as often as they should. Actually, it's not even that people don't use them... people don't even carry them nearly enough.

Test your house placement on Test Center. I was able to place the corner of my castle on a ring of rocks, some of which block movement. I'm not sure how, since I figured that would block placement, but my guess is that since the walls of that corner don't sit on the rock (the impassable rocks are in the middle of the corner), that may be why it's OK. If you explore the land on the live server, you'll find tons of spots being poorly utilized (i.e. a tower in a clearing that can fit a keep, or a large brick, a tower and 2 small houses in a place that looks like it can fit a castle). Go exploring, and then go to Test Center to check out the spots you think can hold bigger housing. If the spot does, leave some books behind on the houses on the live server with a note stating your interest in buying. That was how I ended up getting a large brick that was blocking my castle spot I wanted - so instead of paying 2.5 or 3 million for my castle, I paid deed plus 100k or so.

One thing I noticed as I began to explore PvP more was that the better players do not plan on dying. Of course, part of the reason they don't plan on dying is because they're good. But the other part is that they're well-prepared. If you're PvPing with GM weapons and armor, you're a garbage PvPer. Take one of the vanqs out of the chest in your tower and give yourself a chance in the fight. The truly good PvPers and PKs have no intention of dying. They ride nightmares, carry magic reflect items and +10 or +20 vanqs. They carry 50 to 100 stones worth of potions and trapped pouches. And because they're prepared, they don't die very often. They don't hide and go AFK outside of their home and get killed by someone who bumps into them, reveals them, and draws over an ogre or lich to kill them. They don't die due to running out of yellow/orange/red potions. They don't die due to not having enough trapped pouches. They don't die due to mounts running out of stamina, because they're on nightmares.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in this game was not preparing myself when I went out to farm. Whether I was on my tamer, my dexer, or my bard, I never brought potions with me, and I rarely even carried a trapped pouch. All it takes is 1 table/footstool, 2 red potions, 3 yellow potions, and 3 trapped pouches, and a recall macro to DRASTICALLY increase your chances of surviving a random PK attack or a lag spike. But, I never bothered doing that because I was lazy and figured, "why buy potion kegs and pour potions if I'm just going to die anyways". And it was like a self-fulfilling prophecy; I thought I was going to die, so I didn't prepare well, and I died. Here's a list of what every character should carry with them at all times. This is an INVESTMENT, not a cost. When you live through an attack and don't spend 15 minutes ressing and re-equipping, it becomes clear that the extra 10gp potion you carried was well worth it:

3 Total Refresh potions3 Greater Heal potions1 Greater Cure potion1 Table (and accompanying macro)3 trapped pouches, set to the UseOnce agent (and a hotkey for that)an Item ID wanda hotkey to equip/unequip the Item ID wand or a weapon (useful mostly to disrupt yourself mid-spell... if you're casting Blade Spirit and see a red name show up, you're toast. Disrupt yourself by arming and disarming the wand, and you may be able to run or fight a fair fight)a Recall button/macroa Mini-Heal button/macro, along with Greater Heal and Cure2 recall runes - one to a guarded area, one to an unguarded area in case you become gray accidentally

It's not much at all, but it will save you a TON of time if you take the small amount of effort to set this up right.

Underused Strategies and Skills

One of the more fun skills to use is Stealth. cA has explored this to the hilt, but it can be a ton of fun. Stealthing into moongates that lead into peoples houses can be extremely profitable. Many times, you get caught and sometimes die, but there will be a few big hauls that you get sometimes. And you can really get on people's nerves (in a fun way). It's also fun to watch how people behave, alone or with guildmates, when they think no one is watching.

Detect Hidden is also an underappreciated skill. I had it GMed on a character I took to IDOC's, along with Hiding and Stealth. Since you can detect while hidden, you can reveal everyone hidden around the IDOC. Most of them will be blues who are just trying to snag a chest when the house falls and then recall out. If there's a strong PK presence at the IDOC, you can Detect and reveal all of these scavengers, who will likely get quickly slaughtered. Less grabby fingers equals more loot for you.

Tracking is probably the #1 most underused and underappreciated skill. At one point in time in December, I checked the myUOSA site and I had put 6 of the top 10 murderers online at the time into stat loss. I believe two of them were simply people I had found hidden via tracking, and killed while they were AFK. Cowardly? Sure. But you typically don't go into stat loss unless you cowardly killed a lot of people who had no interest in fighting you. So, karma, or whatever.

I used to recall around with my GM tracker and look for people in dungeons. At GM tracking, you can detect people 5 or 6 screens away or more. In dungeons, you can typically see with one useage who is on the entire floor - or multiple floors. In Shame near the Blood Elementals, you can even notice people who are hunting/taming white wyrms in the ice dungeon. If you are so inclined, you can often find AFK people hidden that you can reveal and lead a monster over to kill. Free loot. I used my tracker a lot to scout for potential victims of my red characters. I never killed people more than once unless they swore or had stupid names or something, and I tried to avoid fighting obvious new players. But there were a few people who annoyed me (ahem, eXm/Zsv/K^A, ahem) that I would always welcome the opportunity to find and kill.

I would use tracking at the Britain graveyard to see who was hidden at the entrance. Our population is pretty small; you can start to see names you've seen before and know that they're, for example, a fencing dexer that usually carries a nice kryss. So if I tracked them with my scout, I'd come back with my thief (who also has tracking, actually), stealth up to them, and steal their kryss when they disarmed it to recall away.

You can also often avoid some potentially hazardous situations with tracking. The other day, I saw someone I'd fought with before in the Lich Lord room. I came back with my red dexer to start a fight with him, and used tracking as I approached (my red dexer also has tracking). Turns out, he had 3 guildmates hidden in the LL room as well. Sorry, no 1v4, thanks anyways, I'll come back another time. And speaking of tracking on a red... it's fantastic. Once you get someone tracked, you keep getting updates on them even if they get a few screens away from you. Often times when that happens, they'll hide up against a house. I do this a lot on my non-PvP characters, and get particular joy watching reds run past like chickens with their heads cut off. With tracking, you just walk right up to them and wait for them to panic and run away, or you use a purple potion to reveal them. With a dexer or a mage, it's also fun to say "Wis Quas [Reveal]" near someone hiding from you. If you actually cast it, they can recall when they see that and usually get away. If you say it while on horseback, you can get them to try a recall and immediately start Harm-spamming them (or swinging at them). I've even said this with a weapon clearly in hand, and the prey will get startled and immediately start running and reveal themself.

I'd often steal dragons with my thief; tracking monsters in, for example, the Elder Gazer room, will let you see ahead of time how many dragons the tamer there has. Then you stealth up to them, snoop their pack to see how much gold they have (i.e. how close they are to banking), how many trapped pouches they have, if any, etc, and choose your strategy from there.

Macros, Macros, Macros.

Record a new macro and double-click on a moongate. Stop recording, and change the macro to "by type". Now set a hotkey for this macro. It is INCREDIBLY useful. Get accustomed to using it, it will save your ass. I've escaped numerous gank squads by actually using their own moongate to escape and hide/recall. There's also some guy named Kenny Powers who has an alt gate him to whatever bard hunting ground he's working on. Numerous times, I've popped back through his own gate into his patio, and my scavenger agent grabbed anywhere from 2k to 10k gold right off of the floor of his patio while his mage alt tried to ban me. Nothing like getting paid to survive the attack.

I couldn't care less what people think about my PvP skill. My goal was to kill people and not die. Period. I don't care if I have "street cred" on here. Most of the people on their high horses about "skilled" pvp here have had the same keyboard macro setup for UO for 10 years. If you're new to PvP and Razor/UO Assist, you're at a huge disadvantage. One way to combat this is with preparation and macros.

Disguise your spells. Rather than making a hotkey for "Energy Bolt", record a macro for it that has a couple lines of fake spells in there too. There are ways to see through this with Razor settings, and the truly excellent PvPers have these settings in use. But for most players, this will disguise your spells as you cast them. So your macro can look like this:

Say "An Ex Por [Paralyze]"Cast Greater HealingSay "In Nox [Poison]"

To another player, it will appear as:

An Ex Por [Paralyze]In Vas Mani [Greater Healing]In Nox [Poison]

...and they won't know what you're casting.

I had one macro in particular that was absolutely devastating to enemies, and I'm going to detail it here. My tanks have killed a number of reds that are probably substantially better than me, and I did almost all of it with this macro. Here it is; I'll explain it below. It's mostly used by my mace tank murderer.

Alter the pauses depending on your ping, lag, etc. Here's how to use this macro.

There's two use cases. If you're PKing someone who doesn't want to fight, you'd typically Paralyze them, cast Explosion, wait 2.5+ seconds (search the forums for "fast cast" for an explanation why), target them with the Explosion, then hit your button for this macro.

If you're PvPing someone who does want to fight, you'd typically bring down their reflect, cast Weaken a few times to try to get them at 100 or even 90 HPs, cast Explosion, pause 2.5 seconds, target them and then hit the button for this macro. You'll be standing next to them trying to cast EQ, so they'll have a chance or two to disrupt your cast. If they do, heal up (you're going to get hit by your own purple potion too, most likely), get back up to 70+ mana, and try again. They'll stay in the fight because they'll think they're winning.

What happens is, you target them with the Explosion spell. This has a 3-second delay until it does damage. You've then set up a purple potion to be thrown. Then you use an Earthquake scroll (you could cast it, but at GM Magery you'll fail more than half the time... at 90+ magery, you'll succeed with the scroll 100% of the time). The text lines will muddle the spell so they hopefully don't see it coming. You can also replace those lines with In Mani and some other 1st circle spells, so they may not even try to disrupt you.

The Earthquake spell takes around 2.25 seconds to cast, and immediately takes half the life of the enemy. Then your explosion spell damage occurs, taking perhaps another 20-25 damage. Then your purple potion takes another 11-20 damage. At this point, you've taken someone at 100 HPs and done an average of 50+23+16 =89 damage. If you got them down to 90 HPs from Weaken, you may even kill them outright with a decent Explosion or potion roll.

If they're still alive and next to you (happens more than you think, because they were just at 100 HPs and went down to 10 or less in a bit under 1.5 seconds), you've now armed a weapon and since you're a macer, you have a 50/50 chance of hitting them for maybe 10 damage with the gnarled staff. Not a lot, but often enough this will kill them. (if you're not a macer, you can swap this part to arm a weapon like a halberd, heavy xbow, or spear, pause for enough time to get a swing, then disarm and arm a staff of lightning). Either way, you'll next use the staff to throw down a lightning bolt on them. I don't think I've ever seen someone live through this full macro by the time the lightning bolt comes down, but if they manage to, you can keep bolting them or throwing purple potions at them as they'll unquestionably be on the run at this point.

It's not even difficult. You just need to have the poise to know you have a good chance of getting your EQ scroll disrupted, and know that you just heal up and wait for 70 mana to try again.

If people actually realize what you're doing, they may very well call you a noob, tell you that you suck (or rather, ooO ooOOOoO OoOO). But I mostly used it on murderers, taking advantage of those who had taken advantage of other less skilled players in the past. Also, I don't care.

You can even modify it for other characters. I had a stealth archer that used this as well. I'd stealth up near someone who was fighting a monster and taking damage. You pop out of hiding when you begin the macro, but by the time they realize what's going on, you've hit them with the Earthquake and the purple potion and are arming a heavy xbow to hit them with that too, as they start to run away. It's tremendous if you're blue, because you can put the speech lines to say "In Mani", "An Nox", "In Vas Mani" and you'll look like you're actually going to heal them. Devious, underhanded... and quite fun.

I've come to agree with those folks who say that using purple potions by hand is much better. I used to have a macro that used a purple it, paused around 3.5 seconds, and then targeted it at my Last Target. But for some reason, it ended up hitting me half the time (and if I reduced the pause to, say, 3.25 seconds, it wouldn't hit me but it would rarely hit the opponent if they were running full speed). For some reason, using the pot with a hotkey and targeting it manually with a TargetLast hotkey after 3 seconds works much better.

Used Items

Everyone makes a big deal about unused weapons and armor. For repairable items, this is frankly a non-issue. Weapons and armor have a certain number of HPs. Their AR and damage are impacted by the PERCENTAGE of HPs they have remaining.

Take a Halberd with 75 HPs for example. When you use it, it slowly loses HPs. At 75/75, it is doing it's full damage. At 68/75, it's probably only doing 95% of it's full damage. At the "falling apart" stage, I believe weapons do only 50% of their damage (and armor only protects 50% as well as a full-strength armor).

When you repair an item, you subtract 1 HP from it's total, but then the item's current HPs goes up to it's new max. So worst case, with a Halberd, it gets repaired and then has 73/73 HPs remaining, and it says "it looks unused", because Arms Lore, too, just looks at the % of HPs left. And at 73/73, it's still doing the exact same damage it was before.

So two takeaways:First, you have no idea if a weapon is used or unused; it can be used for a year, repaired a bunch of times, and still say "It looks unused" if it has 100% of it's currently available HPs. Second, if you buy a "fairly worn" weapon and have a blacksmith alt, or a blacksmith in your guild, you can have them repair it for you and it is virtually identical to a truly unused weapon. In fact, since weapons spawn with such a wide range of HPs (Halberds, for example, can have beteen 31 and 80 HPs), one of them can spawn with 80 HPs, be used and repaired a dozen times, and still be far more durable than one that spawned with 31 HPs but was never actually used at all.

By far, one of the most profitable things you can do in this game is buy used vanquishing weapons at a discount, repair them, and use them or sell them. No one will know the difference with Arms Lore, and realistically, no one can tell the difference in performance between a Halberd that has 75 HPs max versus one with 73 HPs max.

Tele-Hide

Many people know about this... but if you're being targeted by a monster or player, you can teleport and hide all at once. Normally, when being attacked, you must be more than 8 tiles away from your attacker to successfully hide (and more than 8 tiles away at sub-GM levels of Hiding). With Teleport, if you time it right, you can hide anywhere. And if you can't time it right, a simple trick I use is to hold down my Hide button while the cursor for Teleport is up. You will hide the instant you reach your teleport destination. Players see a cloud of smoke where you end up, so if they're sharp they'll know where you are. But if they're a dexer and have no purple potions, you're effectively safe. And if you're hiding from an NPC/monster, you're definitely safe.

Attributes and Skills

Your skills cannot rise when you have either a 0% chance, or a 100% chance, of succeeding at an action. Your displayed skill is adjusted by your stats. And your displayed skill is the one that is used to determine the chance of success at something.

Imagine you have 50.0 real skill at taming, and 10 STR. You might have 51.0 Displayed skill. Now let's say you have 50.0 real skill, but 100 STR. Now you have 59.0 Displayed skill.

Obviously, at a lower displayed skill, like 51 instead of 59, you have a much better chance to gain skill points upon taming attempts. So it definitely benefits you to keep a low STR (if possible) as you raise taming. What I'd suggest is to keep yourself at 10 STR until you're about 3 or 4 skill points shy of being able to tame bulls. That will have allowed you to have gone from 50.0 to 65.0 real skill in the time it would have taken someone with 100 STR to go from 40.0 to 55.0. I hope this isn't too confusing. Then you can get to 100 STR by a herding macro and instantly jump to bulls, which raise your skill much faster than another 3 or 4 skill points worth of gains with white wolves.

Tower Eaves

The eaves of a tower can obscure visibility for players. Try it, if you have multiple characters online. Have one stand underneath the eave, in what should be plain view (or put a table there or something). Now walk outside of the overhang. The person appears to be invisible. You can see their name with the AllNames button, but they don't look like they're actually there.

There's a couple ways to take advantage of this. I took my tamer to a tower near ACE stables, and left a few dragons underneath a tower eave, and renamed them to something like "a sheep", or something like that. I then walked around the ACE stables until someone attacked me. Sure enough, it took only moments. I healed a few times, stuck around long enough to drop a couple explosions on them and get them down to between 60 and 80 HPs, and then I turned around and ran. Most people don't heal when following you, because they think they have the advantage and want to concentrate purely on offense to kill you. Sure enough, I run under the eave of the tower with my "hidden" dragons, and give a quick "all guard me". Dead red.

Boxing In

There are a few places between floors of dungeons and the inside/outside of entrances that can be exploited based on the spots you're teleported to when you run in or out. The most famous of these, in my experience, is Covetous 4/5 (the stairs between the lich room and the lake area). When you run from the lich room, down the stairs, you're placed in the lake area stairs a few steps down. Now... if you look at the spot you're standing on, you can surround it with boxes - including some boxes on the stairs above where you're standing. That level of the stairs above you contains the teleport spot to move back up the lich room level. So you can set up a situation where someone goes from the lich room level, down the stairs, and is immediately and unknowingly boxed in on the lake level. It takes a lot of setup, but if you know someone is going to try to follow you down to the lake area to PK you, you can set up a trap down there (with dragons, guildmates, etc) and essentially trap someone in those boxes where they're pretty helpless.

Additionally... one of the more profitable places to PK is Destard Level 1, since it's occupied often by bards who have a lot of gold on them. But, annoyingly, they often have GM hiding, and will run as soon as they see you, towards the entrance. They'll run out, and either hide out there, or immediately run back in and hide inside the dungeon (while you just got outside and are looking for them). By the time you figure out which side of the entrance they're on, or are starting to try to reveal them, they're recalling away.

If someone is in Destard that's been a particularly tough mark, it takes 4 boxes to block off the front entrance. Of course, they can simply pick one up and move it aside to run by, so I typically set up boxes 2 or 3 stacks high. You can also stack some up over by the entrance to level 2 of Destard, which is typically where a scared GM Hider will run when they see the entrance blocked off. It takes 5 boxes to block that off (again, 10 or 15 to make it a few rows high so it would be time-consuming (and deadly) for them to try to move the boxes aside).

Runes

I typically name my runes to distort what they are. So if I had a rune for Britain Bank, I'd name it "courtyard" or "home" or "Northern Territories" or something like that. My thought was, if someone killed me and tried to recall to my "courtyard", they'd be whacked in town. So at least I'd get that satisfaction. This only worked maybe 3 times on reds over the course of my time on UOSA, but it is quite satisfying and easy to do, so you may as well. I've seen a few other people using this technique as well.

My Characters

I had a blast playing a bunch of different characters during my time here.

GM Magery, Macing, Tactics, Anatomy, Healing, Resist, ParryMy parry dexer. Almost impossible to kill. In full invulnerability plate plus an invulnerable heater, and a protection item, I had something like 94 AR (109 if I had an alt cast the Protection spell on me as well, but that wears off). I would go toe-to-toe (stand next to it) with a Balron and kill it pretty handily (though potions were helpful). The Ancient Wyrm is much tougher, as you're constantly chugging potions to cure his poison claws so your bandages actually heal damage. I actually soloed the AW without my shield, for that very reason - the equip delay actually ended up making the shield a liability as I'd often get poisoned twice in rapid succession at the end of a bandage and wouldn't get the second cure off. Parrying is pretty bad on this shard though. You need to disarm the shield before you can use a potion, and with the action delay of around [EDIT]1000, you're looking at 2-3 seconds without your shield equipped, each time you need to drink a potion.

GM Magery, Hiding, Stealth, Archery, Tactics, Meditation, Evaluate Intelligence.Stealth Archer. The last two skills aren't certainties; you could also make an argument for Anatomy and/or Wrestling. Anatomy looked to me like it gave an average of 4 more damage with a heavy xbow. Eval would increase the damage of e-bolts by more than 10, so seemed like a better choice. I also ended up using this character a lot in my Tower of Death... I'd send a gate to the Britain bank from inside a room in the tower, dispel it, and hide behind a row of tables. The gate would come into my tower in a room with a bunch of trapped chests and no way out. If someone managed to avoid the temptation of opening the chests, I'd just come out of hiding to throw down an EV on their side of the tables. Or kill them with spells and an x-bow bolt. I'd sometimes have to try a couple towns to find someone interested in walking in the gate, so Meditation was needed... and I was always behind tables, so Wrestling wasn't a factor.

GM Taming, Animal Lore, Magery, Resist, Wrestling, Meditation, 93 VeterinaryMy primary money-maker. Earns money a lot faster than a bard, especially at Elder Gazers. In a good hour, I could make 80k there in gold and gems... but that doesn't factor in the amount of prep time. Probably long-term, 50-60k per hour. I always carried gate scrolls. I made a post about this a while back, but for tamers, if you see some red names coming, the typical process should be: Say "all guard me". Double-click gate scroll, target rune. Say "all follow me" twice (just in case one of them fails the first instance of it). Hit your blue moongate macro button. And you'll be safe with your dragons 99% of the time. No sense in fighting reds. If there's 1 of them, you're at a big advantage, but they can avoid death if they're careful because your dragons are so slow to chase. If there's multiples, you're at a huge disadvantage. Just get out of there. As for what pets to use, you never need more than 2 dragons. Any more and you're going to be spending more time feeding them for little to no benefit in killing monsters faster. And use dragons, not white wyrms... white wyrms cast Mass Curse, and are significantly slower than dragons at killing things.

GM Magery, Meditation, Eval Int, Resist, Wrestling, Macing, TacticsMy tank PK and lame attempt at roleplaying (I had intended to name him "an ancient lich" but forgot). Ran around with a black or gnarled staff of vanquishing and tried to kill people with PvP macros that included some pseudo-roleplaying speech. Mostly relied on the Earthquake macro above.

90 Magery, GM Swords, Tactics, Anatomy, Healing, Resist, 30 Hiding, 80 TrackingPvP/PK dexer. I tried to keep him blue, as sort of a backup to my fence PK if I ever needed a PvP dexer and it was in stat or something. I only picked swords because I had a bunch of nice 1-handed sword weapons that weren't being used by any other characters.

90 Magery, GM Fencing, GM Tactics, GM Anatomy, GM Healing, GM Resist, 10 Hiding, 100 Tracking.This was my dex PK. Quite a lot of fun to play. I'd use the Hiding when I wanted to go AFK for a moment, or to sit and wait for someone I scared off to return. Tracking was useful in case someone got a bit offscreen, or far enough to hide from me. The 90 magery was to be able to cast level 6 spells without fail, but in hindsight, I never actually cast a level 6 spell. I only ever really cast Recall, to move around from spot to spot, or to escape if I was outnumbered but managed to hide somewhere but feared I'd eventually be revealed and killed. This is probably the "best" template, in my eyes (well, the 7th skill is arguable, but whatever). It's nearly impossible to kill - I think I killed around 130 people, and never died once. Though I tried to avoid fighting 2+ people at once if they knew what they were doing. The odds are overwhelmingly not in your favor.

GM Magery, Meditation, Music, Provocation, Cartography, Lockpicking, HidingTreasure Hunter and dungeon chest looter. Also my only bard. Having no wrestling hurt, but being able to telport-hide was a huge asset. T-maps on this shard aren't really worthwhile anymore, due to the map level being uncertain. It's hard to find a reputable seller. Furthermore, even before that patch, I didn't find them too fun since prices on the maps was so high it basically made the margin of profit from doing the map pretty low. My tamer was much more profitable. Even straight-up provoking was probably more profitable than buying and completing maps.

GM Magery, Meditation, Wrestling, Hiding, Stealth, Detect Hidden, TrackingMy scout. I'd use this character to scout dungeons for my PK/PvP characters, and loot houses. I've outlined the uses of stealth, detect hidden, and tracking above... but I cannot highlight enough how fun this character was to play. By the end, this was my basically my "main".

GM Magery, Arms Lore, Item ID, Tailoring, Carpentry, Blacksmith, TinkeringTrapping a chest in your pack means when it explodes, you're an aggressor and will take a count. Trapping it while it's on the ground will keep you from this fate.

GM Magery, Arms Lore, Item ID, Meditation, Alchemy, Inscription, PoisoningI've said this before in other posts, but I think poisoning should be kept on a mule character. My fence murderer typically carried a poisoned kryss and a poisoned war fork. So that's a couple dozen chances to poison someone. Typically, fights wouldn't last anywhere near that long.

GM Magery, Wrestling, Snooping, Stealing, Hiding, Stealth, 50 Meditation, 50 TrackingWrestling is a must for a thief. A few informed people quickly realize you're a thief and will kill you outside of town immediately (knowing they will turn gray, but you cannot give them a count as a thief). And a few more people who realize you've stolen from them will attack you when you try to recall away. If they're a dexer and you don't have wrestling, you're dead. Stealing outside of town is probably half as profitable as barding (and twice as fun). A lot of pvpers carry some nice vanq weapons that you can steal if you stealth up to them and wait for them to disarm and recall. I'd also often use this character to steal tamers' dragons. I'd stealth up to them and check their pack to see what they were carrying, and often times I'd see a treasure map and I'd just stop right there, steal it, and recall. It's a huge money-maker, because you know it's a level 4 or 5 if they're killing Elder Gazers or Blood Elementals respectively. If they didn't have a map, I'd equip an ID wand and ID their loot in their pack. If there were no vanqs, I'd click on their gold to count it and figure out how long I had to prep. Many tamers recall to the bank, leaving their dragons in the dungeon, and then recall back to the spot and start up again. You often have 10 seconds or so (more if they had a lot of individual items to bank) to take their dragons once they recall. I set up a macro to use a gate scroll (again, the spell doesn't have a 100% success rate but the scrolls do), target a rune. I had a rune on the floor of my castle to the same spot, so I'd head back there, set up a gate from my castle to the spot, and do the same trick on the dragons later at my convenience, then wait until they went wild in my castle and retame them (first try since they're pretames) with my tamer. Anyways my rune was for some place in the wilderness near the Sacrifice shrine (there'a virtually no spawn at all there). Then I'd go into war mode, aggro the dragons on the other side of the gate so come after me and inadvertently walk through it, and then I'd hit another button that was a macro for Dispel Field - wait for target - Target by type (blue moongate). One time I did this and just sat there gloating to myself, thinking I had all the time in the world to get the dragons because they owner would have no way of knowing where they were... and the guy whose dragon I stole ended up killing me because I was gray and unmounted (and unprepared!). Then he found the rune on my body, recalled there and got his dragons back. Woops.

GM Magery, Meditation, Eval Int, Resist, Wrestling, Swords, TacticsRun-of-the-mill tank mage. I tried to avoid this cliche template, it was my last character because I found such a cookie-cutter template to be lame... but halberds are so much more powerful than any other weapon, it's hard to avoid. This character stayed blue and didn't really murder people, he was more of an anti-PK character.

Great tips. There is still SO much I don't know about this game, despite playing it for so long. I am still confused about the armor and weapon HP and damage/damage absorbed formulas but I think I learned a little from your tips =)

Yes, you are the man! Puff out your chest and stop by to tell us how badass you are. Thanks for adding to the thread.

As I mention, it kind of is tough because the people new to it are competing against folks like yourself with probably 5+ years of experience at it. You've got familiar keyboard setup, etc. It's a steep learning curve just for that reason alone... let alone learning the shard-specific stuff like the hally cycling and whatnot. I was still adding hotkeys up until a couple weeks ago. And even after maybe 2.5 months of leetomgwtfpvp, I had a pretty good keyboard setup of hotkeys, and felt I had an advantage against most people (and a disadvantage against only a few).

But this really isn't a PvP guide. There's a couple of things in there related to that, most notably the Earthquake macro that was pretty awesome, but most of it is just random things I learned along the way during my time here. But the pvp-applicable ones will hopefully help narrow the gap between the experienced and the newcomers.

Jinnarin - 90 Magery, GM Fencing, GM Tactics, GM Anatomy, GM Healing, GM Resist, 10 Hiding, 100 Tracking.This was my dex PK. Quite a lot of fun to play. I'd use the Hiding when I wanted to go AFK for a moment, or to sit and wait for someone I scared off to return. Tracking was useful in case someone got a bit offscreen, or far enough to hide from me. The 90 magery was to be able to cast level 6 spells without fail, but in hindsight, I never actually cast a level 6 spell. I only ever really cast Recall, to move around from spot to spot, or to escape if I was outnumbered but managed to hide somewhere but feared I'd eventually be revealed and killed. This is probably the "best" template, in my eyes (well, the 7th skill is arguable, but whatever). It's nearly impossible to kill - I think I killed around 130 people, and never died once. Though I tried to avoid fighting 2+ people at once if they knew what they were doing. The odds are overwhelmingly not in your favor.

God I hate this character

Everytime I ran into you it seemed like you had 500 dex and a dp'ed vanq kryss

Everytime I ran into you it seemed like you had 500 dex and a dp'ed vanq kryss

Actually, when I ran into you (at least, when you were playing Ifrit), I was only using lesser poison. And really, that was only for fighting dexers, to disrupt their bandages if they didn't have cure potions. Though a lot of mages did stop to cure it, even lesser poison, so it was a nice distraction I guess. I didn't see the purpose of deadly poison, since it had less charges (12, vs 20 for lesser) and was much more expensive to make. But I began trying it out and found that it was helpful and did do meaningful damage when someone was running away.

Anyways, this was my best character. It is ridiculously powerful with invulnerable armor, and pretty much unkillable with reflect items too. But, to give you credit, I don't believe I ever did kill you.

pablo wrote:

Great tips... I'm going to see how bad I can screw up that Earthquake scroll macro. I'm the king of screwing up a good plan and then I stand there and forget what to do next...

Make it just like it is in my post and you'll be fine. Just remember to wait 2.5 seconds between casting explosion, and targeting it and then hitting the macro. You should manually:

Cast ExplosionWait 2.5 secondsTarget Explosionhit EQ macro

I actually practiced on Giant Serpents in Destard They tend to have enough HPs to last through until the end of the macro, so you can see if each part is hitting correctly.

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